I'm trying to find a word or phrase that describes the ending to a story where the outcome is generally negative and unfulfilling. At the end of these stories, the protagonist usually makes a decision ...

Is there a literary term for when an author refers to something that is going to happen later?
I am referring to two usages of this technique.
The first is when an author says "as will be explained ...

Abandon all logic ye who enter here, because we are about to start talking Lucy. You might want to leave reason and science by the door while you’re at it, you won’t have much call to use either of ...

Stories like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn often have large time gaps between narration. Days, weeks, or even years might pass between chapters or scenes in stories such as these.
What word or ...

I have been stumped in characterizing Medbh McGuckian's style of poetry: she often vividly describes the actions of things in her works to imply what they are. For example, within the context of war, ...

On Breaking Bad, Saul Goodman remarks, "Some people are immune to good advice." Similarly, a friend of mine described a weekend as "a celebration of procrastination".
Does word play that juxtaposes ...

Personification (or anthropomorphism) is attributing human features to non-humans.
Technically, a dead human is not a human and we give the attribute of walking to the dead. So, Is "the walking dead" ...

I am writing a college admissions essay and would like to get a professional opinion on whether it is acceptable to use the truncated and informal version of the word "mathematics" as "math". I ask ...

A common tactic in the deliberate spread of misinformation such as is common in chain emails, is to state something true and easily proven in order to gain the reader's trust, then follow it with a ...

There is a stylistic device where you begin and end a text with the same metaphor.I'm sorry I don't have a "real-world" example in English, but I'll try to describe what I mean.
Let's say there's an ...

I came across the term “narrative nonfiction” in the New York Times article titled “What should children read?” (November 22). It seems to be a journalist’s and book editors’ favorite jargon from the ...

I was wondering what the term was for a intentional understatement of an obvious excess to emphasize that excess.
For example saying Bill Gates is “doing well for himself”. Anyone familiar with Bill ...

What is the correct term for a book that sits alongside another book in time and universe, sharing some characters and events? Not after (a sequel) or before (a prequel), but parallel.
Example: I've ...

What is the literary term used to describe long vowel sounds?
For example in Ted Hughes's "Your Paris" in his Birthday Letters anthology "Eerie Familiar Feeling", what term would be used to describe ...

I'm translating a book I wrote some years ago from Portuguese to English, and there's a section that describes the locations, spaces and factions from a specific fictional work.
Whats the best word ...